I have a bizarre urge to write poetry, never mind that I’m not much of a poet. There’s a swell of words and emotions and … tarry black stuff that feels clogged up and impossible to otherwise express. The stifled blackened swollen anal gland of the mind, for some delicious imagery.
I’ve started dabbling in some old habits that long ago I lost love for, through my own impossibly high demands and unfulfillable needs. Secretly I find I still enjoy them and in some ways this perplexes me. In other ways it illuminates. When there isn’t the pressure–the need–the hope and possibility that these creative outlets might become grand, there’s a joy that was once lost, a purity, a freedom. Is the work as good as it might’ve been, at my most disciplined, most demanding? Hardly. But I find myself happy, which I rarely do, these days.
How to balance, then, the drive to improve and not just to improve but also to prove to the world that I have something to say?
I am a silent person by nature. It’s not that I don’t talk, but I rarely express myself well via talking. Better written, better drawn, better screamed in little, controlled letters marching across the screen or the gashing tear of paper under palette knife laden with paint…
Sometimes I think–
Kill that word, kill it dead, HOPE. And while you’re at it… POSSIBILITY, POTENTIAL, PUBLICATION, LEGITIMACY, VALIDITY.
If you expect nothing, everything brings you joy.
Trouble is, if you expect nothing, can you really ever achieve something?
LC Hu 